Monday, August 01, 2011

Another major contributor to the rising debt and deficit has been the huge tax breaks granted giant corporations and the very affluent layers of the society. For example, according to Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ), known for its accurate reports on taxation, the combined amount of taxes paid by the following 12 corporations for the 2008-2010 period was zero—no, it was less than zero! Collectively, they got $2.5 billion in refunds.

The 12 corporations were: Exxon Mobile, Wells Fargo, DuPont, American Electric Power, Boeing, FedEx, IBM, General Electric, Honeywell International, United Technologies, Verizon Communications, and Yahoo. CTJ reports that "from 2008 through 2010, these 12 companies reported $171 billion in pretax U.S. profits. But as a group, their federal income taxes were negative: –$2.5 billion." (It must be pointed out that although the total federal income taxes for the group of 12 as a whole was negative, 4 out of 12 paid some federal tax, but the little tax that those 4 paid was more than offset by the other 7 companies' not having paid any.)

This is an indication of how major US corporations pay—or avoid paying—their tax liabilities. The extremely rich and powerful interest groups have (since the late 1970s and early 1980s) deliberately used a combination of raising military spending and lowering their tax obligations in order to redistribute the national resources from the bottom up. As this combination leads to increases in debt and deficit, it then forces cuts on non-military public spending.

This represents a cynically clever strategy on the part of the ruling plutocracy that benefits from war, militarism, debt and deficit: instead of financing their wars and military adventures by paying taxes proportionate to their income, they give themselves tax breaks, finance their wars of choice through borrowing, and then turn around and lend money (unpaid taxes) to the government and earn interest. The wealthy have thus successfully converted their tax obligations to credit claims, that is, lending instead of paying taxes, which is in essence a disguised form of robbery.

It is obvious from this brief analysis that Washington's political dogs howling at the non-military public spending as the source of the escalating national debt and deficit are barking up the wrong tree. As long as the out-of-control spending on war and militarism is not contained, the multi-trillion dollar corporate welfare handouts (in the form of tax giveaways and costly rescue/bailout packages) are not curtailed, and the skyrocketing costs of health care are not restrained, the national debt and deficit are bound to continue their upward trend.

It is also obvious that the American people are lied to when they are told that all the wrangling that is going on in Washington over the debt ceiling is to reduce national debt. In reality, the national debt will continue to rise even if the corporate government takes a few trillion dollars out of it by further reducing the non-military public spending, that is, by further reducing the people's standard of living.